


a great certainty

by werepope (quiteparadise)



Category: Digimon - All Media Types, Digimon Adventure Zero Two | Digimon Adventure 02
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Good luck Daisuke, M/M, The laws of magic are nonsensical
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-15
Updated: 2020-05-15
Packaged: 2021-03-02 18:13:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,057
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24201124
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quiteparadise/pseuds/werepope
Summary: Magic is about what could happen but doesn't.
Relationships: Ichijouji Ken/Motomiya Daisuke | Davis Motomiya
Comments: 4
Kudos: 18





	a great certainty

I don’t know. But I do know  
even if a horn & voice plumb  
the unknown, what remains unsaid  
coalesces around an old blues  
& begs with a hawk’s yellow eyes.  
\- _yusef komunyakaa_

...

A witch lives in the holler. Daisuke’s mother chides him -- “witch” is an unkind word -- but she is a witch, whether it’s mean or not. She introduces herself to him as such, once he’s worked up the courage to do more than skulk in the trees on the rise above her house, watching her smack a rug clean with a long birch stick. The day before, he watched her haul pails of clear water from the creek in through the front door and out the back to fling it, murky grey, onto the remnants of last year’s leaf cover, newly exposed by the snowmelt.

Daisuke has been called many things in his short life, but “cautious” has never been one of them, so he creeps down to eye her up close. She doesn’t look like a witch -- no crooked back or gnarled hands -- but only witches have gardens of weeds cultivated into such neat rows, and only a witch would live alone so far from the village, protected only by the trees and the jut of hills on either side of her cottage.

She spies him peeking out from behind the goat shed and calls out to him without breaking the swing of her long brown arm: “Little boys with mean little minds get eaten."

Daisuke is not cautious, but he’s not mean either. He puffs up with insult, all cheeks and chest as he barrels out of hiding.

“I’m nice,” he protests. “And I’m not little!” He loses steam when the witch turns her head to fix him fully in her gaze, all the bravado rushing out of him in a whoosh that squeaks a bit at the end.

“Are you sure?” the witch asks, tugging the rug down from the line. And so Daisuke rushes to help her with it, folding it over and over until they can carry it into the house like a big, fat snake.

From the outside, the witch’s house looks small and dark, but from the inside it is just as warm and clean as his own home. Better even, because here there is tile on the floor around the open hearth instead of hard packed dirt. He takes great pleasure in stamping on it, listening to the slap of his bare feet on dark clay.

“Perhaps you are a nice boy,” she concedes, and heaps a massive armful of rushes on him. He does a careful job of it at first, listening to her instruction and laying fat handfuls evenly, but he hurries a bit when his arms start to get tired. By the end of the load, he’s groaning for the effort, and only breaks off when he gets to fling himself down onto the fresh green, crisp and sweet-smelling.

The witch puts up her birch stick and stokes up the fire before hanging a fat black kettle over it. “I’m Kama, the old witch,” she says, giving him the full weight of her stare again as the fire flares up bright to lick the iron. “You can call me Baba. It’s a good name for old witches.”

Daisuke heaves himself up onto his heels, crosses his arms over his knees, and stares at her hard. He’s only nine -- even his own mother looks like an old lady to him -- but he weighs the name along with the intent. For a nine-year-old who has never been out of his small village or learned more skill than weaving clumsy mats, he’s not dull. He frowns.

“Mama said ‘witch’ isn’t a good word.”

Baba crouches down to mirror his posture. Folded up tightly, with her toes spread in the rushes, she isn’t so much bigger than him.

“Most people would say witches aren’t good.”

Daisuke doesn’t have to think as long or as hard about that. He looks around the room, with its clean corners and smoke-strained roof beams hung with drying spring plants, fragrant with the smell of greenery. He looks at Baba, with her dark eyes and smirking mouth, and he doesn’t have to think much at all.

“If you’re a witch,” he says, puffing up again, “then I guess they’re okay.”

…

Baba teaches Daisuke to recognize the plants that grow in the hills around her little house. How to stew stinging nettle leaves into tea to soothe swollen joints. How to pry great hunks of agarikon from the limbs of dying trees and how to wield the pestle to grind it into a fine powder for stomach cramps. She teaches him how to turn chunks of moss over with his fingers and read the weather in the dense mat of roots. She teaches him how to listen to the susurration of wind through the leaves, the language of things to come. She teaches him witchery, and he pays her back with unflagging devotion.

“There are other kinds of magic,” Baba tells him as they sit at the hearth, listening to cicadas wake up in the trees. “But this is the magic of your home. Your hills. None will ever come as easily or treat you as sweetly. You remember these things,” she says. There is forbearance in her voice, a warning that he is not practiced enough at nuance to hear.

They weave plaits with soft green willow branches. Baba’s seem to go on and on forever, her clever hands tucking and folding, sweeping out to untangle the trailing ends from the folds of her skirt. Daisuke sits on his heels near her feet, huffing frustration every time the wood splits, too busy flicking his attention up to Baba’s quick fingers.

“So’s there sea magic?” he asks. “Field magic? What about roads? I bet there would be. You could do a lot of stuff, I bet, with wagon wheels and stuff.”

“Oh?”

He affects her most patient tone. “Magic is about what could happen but doesn’t. Like in between two steps,” he says, and gets up to demonstrate, lifting a foot and lowering it toward the ground so slowly he starts shaking with the effort. “Everything could happen! There could be an ember in the rushes or a cat could run under me or everything else.”

“Potential,” Baba says, giving him the most important word yet. He beams.

“Yes. Magic is potential.”

If Baba is pleased by this revelation, she doesn’t show it, just sweeps her fingers through the trailing length of her plait and nods down to Daisuke’s, uneven and -- worse -- unfinished.

Daisuke sits, and as he braids he thinks about the wealth of things that aren’t happening, until his brain feels clogged with them.

…

  
  


In the city on the coast, hundreds of miles from the holler, there is a place where the greatest magicians in the world gather to teach the generation that will follow. They hunt them up from every corner, children of astounding talent and character, to inherit the legacy of magic. Or so it was in ages past. Now these great magicians trust finding the heirs onto five men, each of whom go forth when the conditions are right and the heavens are aligned, to seek sources of great potential.

Traditionally, they find them in the other cities. Magic is taught by tutors, and so most heirs are of some affluence, with a history of mild magic in their bloodlines and whose family names appear on lists which are presented to the seekers, swaying the process from a hunt to a series of interviews.

Gennai is headed to the pastoral mountain city, bisected by two strong rivers and possessing six families of very old and competent magic. He doesn’t get lost on the way, exactly, although it’s a good approximation. He gets pulled off the road by the smell of a baker’s busy oven, then stays for the wriggle of magic he can feel on the air. It only takes him fifteen minutes to wander down into the holler and find the witch. It takes him the better part of an hour to convince her to let him meet her apprentice.

Daisuke is sixteen, sun browned, wild about the eyes, and possesses such a restless energy that his toes twitch for the duration of the interview, crunching in the rushes.

“Your mistress--”

“That’s Baba,” Daisuke cuts in, looking over at her for approval.

Gennai looks over as well, hesitates a beat before continuing: “Your grandmother said she has been teaching you magic for some years now. Witchery. She said you would be willing to demonstrate it for me. No need to be fancy. You just need to show me a few things that you’ve learned.”

Daisuke glances at Baba again, but she only hands him a fistful of black iron nails, taken from the roof of the goat shed two years ago, after it developed a creeping leak and thirteen shingles had to be replaced. Baba split the shingles herself. A witch is self-sufficient above all things. The nails were collected from a stash kept for various purposes. They are a hair shorter than Daisuke’s fingers, rough hewn and bent at various angles.

Self-sufficiency does not extend to having a forge in the yard, and so Baba’s collection is of professional grade iron, but the sources are widely varied. Most come in trade. Blacksmiths need witchery more often than witches need iron. And witches are rather unpicky about the shape of the iron they get.

Daisuke sets all but one of the nails down on the tile. “They’re real,” he says, when Gennai picks one up and tests it between his fingers. “Iron’s important. You can use it for all kinds of things. The smith said that in the city they make doors out of it, even.”

As he speaks, he rolls the nail between his palms, back and forth. When he parts his hands and sets it down on the tile to pick up another, it’s straight as the day it was forged. Even the squared off edges are smoother.

Gennai watches him straighten all six nails. He counts the number of times Daisuke rubs his hands together, he watches the way he handles them bent, then the way he handles them after straightening. He watches Baba, out of the corner of his eye. He doesn’t listen to what Daisuke is saying at all, which is why he pulls back in surprise when Daisuke leans forward into his space and asks, loud:

“Are you?”

“Am I what?”

“From the city,” Daisuke says, handing him the last nail. “You look like you are. No offense, but no one dresses like that around here. White’s sort of a stupid color to wear while you’re travelling. Everyone can see how clumsy you are. It’s all up your legs.”

 _Witchery_ , Gennai thinks, and thanks Daisuke very much for the demonstration. Baba dismisses him, sending him out into the yard to tend the patchy garden.

“And strip those rushes,” she says, as Daisuke tromps out through the open door.

Gennai watches her, not the boy. He's impressive — there are potential heirs in the city who have never done anything half as practical as straighten iron, but the magicians in the city by the sea are less interested in iron than books. And Gennai will have to convince the witch to let him go. It's a difficult thing, convincing a witch who already has _no_ in her mind, harder than nails.

“He’ll be educated,” Gennai says. The witch snorts.

“He’ll be looked after: fed and housed and given a wage, even as an apprentice.”

The witch steps up onto a three-legged stool and pulls down bundles of dried leaves and flowers, hooking the loops of string onto her pinky finger.

“He’ll be guaranteed a lifetime position with one of the oldest institutions in the country,” Gennai says.

The witch looks down at him, her brown face smooth and blank.

“If he makes it,” she says, and Gennai nods.

“If he makes it.”

The witch pulls down a bundle of velvety lambs ear and says, to the smoke-darkened rafter: “Do you hear that? You have potential.”

Gennai turns his head and sees Daisuke in the doorway, a clump of wild onion in his fist, dirt showering gently down onto his bare feet as he trembles. The moment hangs, stretches for a long moment.

The witch steps down from her stool. “Well?”

Daisuke is clever and exuberant and better at gardening than he is listening to the speaking wind.

He leaps, yelling: “Yes! Yes yes yes!” 

He picks the witch up off her feet when he hugs her, swings her around and around, still clutching a clump of earth-crusted onion and crushing fresh rushes underfoot.

…

The city by the sea is home to three houses of magic, cloistered together in a complex of green limestone buildings that jut up high on a cliff overlooking the seawall. Daisuke learns to read and write, first in the compact strokes that make up the words he has spoken all his life, and then in the curls and sweeps that the magicians use and which is spoken by no one. He learns how to eat shellfish and how to sleep on a bed stuffed with wool. He doesn’t learn how to keep his mouth shut when his brain is working hard, no matter how emphatically his teachers and fellow heirs try to make him.

Daisuke learns that the magic he was taught in the witch’s holler is nothing like the magicians’, and that everyone else already knew about the right and proper kind even if they didn’t yet know how to spin it up in their minds and turn it out into the air.

He likes the other heirs. They’re smart and help him with his writing exercises, but they don’t understand the trouble of falling asleep with the smell of lanolin in his nose or why he toes his soft leather boots off under the study table. They don’t seem interested, either. He doesn’t blame them. They all lead more interesting lives before coming to the city by the sea. They know better, more interesting things.

Iori can name all the clusters of stars in the short summer night sky. There are some that Daisuke hadn’t seen at home in the hills, let alone could have named, but Iori draws them out on the backs of his papers and links them together with efficient strokes of pen, and the names make sense -- the ram and the otter and the sickle and dozens and dozens more, heavy with import on Iori’s tongue.

Takeru knows more languages than Daisuke knew existed. He speaks them all in a soft, smooth voice, reciting rhymes and fables from memory, when someone asks to hear one. On rainy afternoons he tells Daisuke where each language is spoken, pointing to different shapes on the tapestry of the world that hangs in place of honor in the western library, places Daisuke cannot imagine as more than sounds he can’t replicate.

Hikari has dreams about things that haven’t happened yet. She wakes up early in the morning and sits down and writes all the details out in a journal, because she doesn’t know what is and isn’t important until later, when bits and pieces fall into place. Hikari won’t tell him anything about how great his future is going to be-- “It doesn’t work like that.” -- but she tells them things when they fit together in her mind, just to be safe.

Miyako has special permission to take care of the hawks in the aviary. They all have names, and she can tell them apart by the patterns of light and dark feathers on their necks and tails. When the sky is clear over the sea, she can throw them into the air with a heave of her long arm. They come back to her like arrows when she raises her hand. When she allows him to bribe them with bits of meat, he can pet his hand down their sleek brown backs while they eat.

Daisuke knows how to dig in the dirt and bring up remedies for what ails, but the cliffs don’t have dense green moss to turn over in his hands and the trees are cultivated into tidy rows that don’t whisper.

Daisuke doesn’t know that he is miserable until he’s seventeen. Almost to the day.

Takeru and Iori have birthdays, one after another in the span of just two weeks. Daisuke takes what’s left of his wages for the month and buys wax paper packets of honey-soaked pastry for everyone. Miyako and Hikari turned seventeen in the winter, before Daisuke arrived in the city by the sea, but they take their share. Instead of asking when Daisuke’s birthday is, they take turns guessing. They seem mystified by the truth: he doesn’t know.

In the village by the witch’s holler, children are celebrated together in the summer, between planting and sowing, when little hands can be spared a day of work. Daisuke explains as well as he can. The other heirs grew up in cities, where fields were distances to be crossed between two points of interest. They grew up in houses with tile floors and wool-stuffed beds. They pin a date to him, because not having a birthday to celebrate seems like a cruelty to them, and when the longest day of summer comes they give him gifts.

Miyako gives him a bright blue pen with which to practice his ever-improving penmanship. Hikari gives him sugar-dusted sweets in the shapes of summer flowers. Takeru gives him a book of myths translated from the language of a far away land. Iori calculates the position of the stars that sat in the sky seventeen years ago: the shape of the moth.

Daisuke goes to bed happy.

He wakes up in a cold misery.

Seventeen years ago, the sky directly over the city by the sea held the moth, but in the distant village where Daisuke was born, who could say? Who ever stepped away from their bare dirt hearth and looked up at the sky and contemplated the way the stars combined to look like anything other than the promise of a cloudless sky in the morning?

Daisuke tries not to be sad. He practices his writing and asks Hikari to read poetry and studies star charts, and every morning comes with an ache that he can’t shake out from under his ribs.

Three weeks after his new birthday, a seeker returns to the city with a new heir in tow.

…

Daisuke leans out of the aviary tower, face turned into the wind, and listens to the sea. If he closes his eyes he almost hears the rush of air through trees, the gentle chatter of leaves slipping and knocking together. If he sticks his head out far enough, lays heavily on his folded arms, the sound of the waves breaking against the cliff-face bounce at him off of the green limestone walls and he can almost hear the whisper of them. If he stretches as far as he can, toes barely scraping the floor--

Miyako grabs him by the hem of his jacket and hauls him back.

Inside the tower, the sea is just another narrow sound coming in through the high windows.

Miyako scowls. “You’re going to fall out,” she says, and wrenches him further in with all of her considerable strength.

“I almost got it, though!”

“You almost got up close and personal with the ground, fast.” Miyako smacks him, as she is unfortunately wont to do, and doesn’t even have the decency to care when he yells at her about it. “You think that hurt,” she says, rolling her eyes, and shoves him toward the stairs.

Daisuke groans, leaning back into her with all his weight. She has a good four inches on him, and the muscle that comes from launching birds of fierce killing instinct skyward, but she grunts under the weight, boots sliding on the straw-strewn floor.

“Manipulation was cancelled,” Daisuke whines. “Master Yorimoto couldn’t force-of-will himself out of a head cold. He’s going to be in bed for a week!”

Miyako heaves him off finally. Self-preservation instinct is the only thing that keeps him from being brained on the half-open door.

“Everything was cancelled,” Miyako says. “Gennai is back. They’re getting ready to welcome a new heir.”

Daisuke has been in the city by the sea for less than a year, but Takeru and Hikari were here for months more before anyone else showed up. It can take time to find heirs, like needles in a haystack. The mages have been expecting a sixth, must have been, but for Daisuke it hits like a revelation. A new heir.

He grabs Miyako by the sleeve and they take the stairs at full speed, Daisuke letting out a whoop of joy and Miyako laughing, at or with him. They race across the flagstones, take a shortcut over a honeysuckle-laden wall, and crash into each other at the edge of the courtyard where the mages have gathered. Miyako bites her tongue to stop giggling and darts away to the other heirs, waiting just out of the way and chattering in hushed excitement.

Daisuke stays where he is to watch a dusty coach come in through the open gates and clatter to a stop on the salt-white gravel. A footman is called from the carriage house to haul in the luggage tossed down to him from the driver and, in the flurry of activity, Daisuke is in just the right place to see through the coach window and catch a glimpse of a pale face before the door is pulled open and the new heir steps out.

He’s tall, dark haired, dressed in somber grey. Daisuke can’t make out his expression from this distance, but when the new heir turns his head to take in the gathered crowd, the expanse of the courtyard, the sheer size of the compound of buildings, his gaze catches for just a moment on Daisuke.

The wind comes strong up from the sea, pulling at the new heir’s clothes, sweeping his dark hair across his features, and Daisuke swears he hears a voice in the rush of it: _This_.

…

Ken is all the best features of the other heirs rolled up into one: he’s sweet and soft-spoken and clever and handsome, and every time their eyes meet Daisuke remembers the sound of wind through tall trees, can hear it in the pound of blood through his veins.

This, this, this.

The heirs give him a tour of the grounds. Takeru leads the way to the dormitory, where Ken’s trunk has been brought up and set at the foot of a freshly aired bed. Hikari shows him the library, Iori the way down to the hall where they take their formal lessons. Miyako leads them to the aviary and shows him how to feed the largest of the eagles. Daisuke takes the straightest route to the sea, where Ken stands a few feet from the cliff’s edge, eyes closed against the wind, face turned up toward the sun.

Daisuke stands beside him, watching the way his hair shines as it gets tossed in the breeze, and thinks about potential.

…

Daisuke is better at the language that he speaks than the one he’s supposed to learn to think in. Magic is theoretically limitless, Master Yorimoto explains. To couch it in human terms is to hinder the mind and therefore the possibilities. The unspeakable language was created to communicate the terms of magic without limiting its scope. Daisuke has heard this a few dozen times now, and the squiggle that loosely means air and power and fertility is still only a squiggle, one he can’t get right no matter how often he tries.

And so Daisuke sits in the library, practicing his forms. The others are free to do as they will, or as good as, but until Daisuke can wrap his head around how something could be air and power and fertile -- besides bees, maybe? -- he is stuck on the rudimentary. He’d much rather be outside, in the grass, where at least there would be real bees to study by example. He would rather be getting stung, for that matter, so it’s a surprise to see Ken peek his head in, when he could be anywhere else.

Ken, of course, is advanced far beyond practicing forms.

Daisuke shoves back in his chair and waves, beams when Ken waves back.

“What are you working on?” Ken asks, coming around the table to look down at Daisuke’s clumsy penwork.

Daisuke sighs. “It’s bees.”

Ken tips his head to the side, leans in to get a better look, squints. “Is it?”

“Well, it’s supposed to be. I think. Maybe air and fertility are bees, but then what would power be? Wasps?”

"Maybe,” Ken says, clearly just as confused as Daisuke, but he sits down beside him all the same. “Would you like some help?”

Daisuke folds up over the edge of the table, smearing ink across his sleeve. “It doesn’t make sense. None of this stuff makes sense, you know? _Bees_ make sense. So it’s probably all wrong.” He looks up at Ken, turning pages in Daisuke’s form book. “Did you learn a lot of magic before Gennai found you?”

“Some,” Ken says, nudging Daisuke until he can slide the paper out from beneath him. “My brother had a talent for it, so our parents got good tutors for him.”

“You must have a talent, too. Everyone else here is amazing, and you’re as good as them easy. You sure don’t have to do this.”

Ken dips Daisuke’s pen into the pot of ink and writes the form for air and power and fertility in a long swirl, dots and crosses the appropriate sections tidily -- no smudges on paper or cuff. Daisuke admires the efficiency almost as much as the elegant turn of his narrow wrist.

“Did you have tutors?” Ken asks, tilting a smile down at him.

Daisuke shrugs, heaves himself upright. “Sorta. I’m not from a city or anything. They don’t teach magic where I grew up. Or, I mean, not magic like this.”

Ken looks around the library, with its rows and rows of books, high glass windows tinted pink to keep delicate ink from fading, pages from crumbling. He eyes the tapestry of the world, vast along one wall.

“Bees do make sense,” he says, laughing a little. “I think of it as wind.”

Daisuke smiles, rabbit quick and purely instinctive, just for the sound of Ken’s voice gone bright with humor. “Fertility like dandelion fluff, right? Yeah. I can see that.”

“My brother said that it wasn’t really about making it into words. What’s important is the act of writing it while focusing on the concept and putting your energy into it. If magic were in language, everyone could do it. You’re what’s special.” Ken’s gaze zips away from Daisuke’s face, down to the table, the book, his own graceful writing below Daisuke’s messy attempts. “That’s what Osamu said, anyway.”

Daisuke skims his fingertip over the word -- air, power, fertility -- smearing barely dry ink into a shadow cast behind Ken’s penwork, still legible.

“That’s pretty intense,” he says. “The witch just taught me how to call goats and tell if it was gonna rain.”

Ken touches Daisuke’s arm. When Daisuke looks up at him, he’s smiling, blue-grey eyes gone purple in the light from the tall pink windows.

“Show me?”

They spend the rest of the afternoon with their heads bowed together, squinting out patterns in patches of lichen, trying to come to agreements over what is and isn’t a dragon or a mule or a dairy maid.

…

Daisuke goes to bed with grit under his nails, and even with his face buried in the pillow he can still see Ken’s face as he studied the hyperbolic planes of dust pale green, the pretty shape of his dark lashes, the way his mouth parted in concentration.

…

They walk for the better part of an hour to get down to the shore, taking turns carrying a basket loaded with food begged off of the kitchen staff. It isn’t a trip without a picnic, according to Hikari, and Daisuke would argue with any of the others but he’s hungry even before they make it down the cut track to the pebbled beach, so it’s just as well he didn’t.

The ocean unnerved him when he first arrived. The sound hunted him down in his sleep, pounding through the tall windows that break most walls of the buildings here. The smell, too, salt mucked up with some deep down rot that very nearly put him off eating, at least for a little while. He’s used to it now, although trips down to actually be near it are rare: Hikari and Takeru both grew up on this same coast, Iori doesn’t care for the climb up or down the cliff, and Miyako prefers to be as high up as possible, always. But Ken is good reason to make the effort, and so down they go.

Ken, it turns out, doesn’t like the ocean much either. Daisuke sits with him on a hump of smoothish dark rock and watches the other heirs, ankle deep in the water, already yelling at how cold it is, goading each other to go further out.

“I hate the beds here,” Daisuke says, dropping his chin into his hand and darting only little glances at Ken’s profile. “They all smell like sheep. That’s what Iori says the smell is, anyway. I haven’t met one to know for sure, but Iori’s granddad does weaving or -- textiles. Probably not weaving, exactly. But he’d know, is what I mean, and he says that’s what the smell is. Sheep grease.”

When he looks again, Ken is smiling very small and not looking back at all.

“Well,” Ken says.

“He also said that if I don’t like the smell, I might not like the taste of sheep either, but I don’t know. We don’t have sheep at home. I’ve seen them, though.” He cranes around to point up the shore, north toward the towers and beyond, where the cliffs are topped by nothing but sky. “You can from the aviary. They grazed up there in the spring. I thought for sure I’d see one fall off, but I guess they don’t.”

Ken touches his hand, braced on the rock between them, and leans in to look where he’s pointing, following the line of his arm. He tips his head into Daisuke’s. His laugh is a breath of air on Daisuke’s jaw.

“That would be quite a fall.”

Daisuke turns a fraction, to catch Ken’s face in more than the darkest blur of his periphery, and gets to watch up close as Ken’s eyes lock onto his then, darting, down and back up. Daisuke hears himself swallow, over the waves and the yelling.

“You,” Daisuke starts. Stalls. Tries again. “Look really nice, with the wind on you, like this.”

Ken flushes, bypassing pink all the way to red, and turns back toward the ocean. “Thank you.” When he reaches up to tuck his hair back behind his ear, he is smiling so big Daisuke can still make out the shape of it behind his hand. “I think you’re lovely, too.”

…

Ken is still red the next day, as is Iori, heat touched and aching with it. Miyako and Hikari, browned and lovely, come back from the market with broad straw hats that they bestow to the boys, laughing. Daisuke sneaks his way into the pantry and stares at the bottles, willing himself the cure. But Daisuke can’t make himself know all the things Baba couldn’t teach him, as he has proven countless times over.

He steals a tray of food instead, and lays on the cool stone floor of Ken’s room with him, peeling fruit and coming up with ideas of how he can decorate his new hat.

…

Manipulation is the easiest magic. Manipulation makes sense, at least as much as anything does in the complex. Manipulation is thinking of all the ways that a thing could be different and then making one happen. The hard part is making sure it’s the right one. Daisuke is better at thinking of things than enforcing them, but Master Yorimoto assures him that it will come with practice, and sends him out into the garden. That, at least, he has a great deal of practice at.

The gardens here are manicured rows of flowering hedges, locked in place by gravel paths, all straight lines and very careful curves. The kitchen gardens are more his speed, tidy and utilitarian and busy -- his favorite part. So he heads there, going the long way, town-side through the courtyard and around the western tower, and he thinks about the things that are not happening but could be, or should be, or might be if given the right nudge.

He meets Ken by the orchard, wearing his hat against the sun.

That may have been a nudge. That’s the problem with things that could happen: something always will and the probability is very difficult to factor.

“Do you know,” Daisuke says, “I think I’ve given myself a headache.”

“Is something bothering you?” Ken takes off his hat and Daisuke takes his hand to pull him into the wide bar of shade from the tower.

“Probability and potential,” Daisuke says.

“I see.” Ken rotates the band of the hat on a finger with little flicks of his wrist. “It’s not about the numbers, presumably?”

Daisuke scoffs, throws his hands up. “And presumption, too!” He snags the hat and tugs it down over his own head. “What was the likelihood of that?” he demands.

Ken scratches his neck, where skin is peeling away in ragged little furls. “You’ve been talking with Master Yorimoto, haven’t you?”

Daisuke deflates, sighs and lets all the muscles of his go with it, so that he drops, legs folded under him, to the grass. “I just don’t get how you’re supposed to pick one. If you’re focused on one, then doesn’t that mean you’re not thinking about all the others? And how are you supposed to tell which ones are good? Really good, not just momentarily good. Better than the next one you’ll think of, or the one after that.”

Ken plucks the hat off of his head before sitting down beside him. “I don’t think you can.”

“So how do you know what to pick, then?”

“You just choose one, I suppose,” Ken says, smiling a little when Daisuke growls and makes a grab for the hat. “Not that one. Too predictable.”

Daisuke scoots until he’s sitting right in front of Ken, their knees pressed together. “Right now,” he says. “Right now we are sitting just like this, and in the next moment something is going to happen. What is it?”

“Well, I’m going to respond,” Ken replies.

“No, that’s-- I mean, yes. But that’s the obvious one. It could be anything. A bird could land on my head or someone could throw a brick through the window or anything. Pick one.”

Ken glances over his shoulder at the window, whole and open and empty. “Right now,” he says. He smiles. “Right now, we are sitting in the grass just like this, and you’re frustrated, and I’m still sunburned, and you are not going to respond. You’re going to think about kissing me.”

And Daisuke does. It’s certainly a kind of magic, the way Ken is watching him, waiting for the thought to register and take hold and, yes, Daisuke can’t do anything except think of kissing Ken. Or can’t think of anything to do except kiss Ken.

So Daisuke does.

Presumption and potential and probability, all laid out in that exact order, as Daisuke leans forward and presses his mouth to Ken’s. Ken catches his sleeve, the front of his shirt, to keep him there and kiss him again.

“Of all the things,” Daisuke says, holding onto Ken’s wrist in return, keeping himself caught.

Ken laughs, just a breath against his mouth. “I know,” he says. “Predictable.”

“Perfect.”


End file.
